Data synchronization on Android clients

Abstract

Past decade has witnessed meteoric advances in the field of mobile computing owing to the development of affordable hardware technologies as well as user-friendly software platforms. Android, the platform marketed by Google has boomed in sales over the past few years making it one of the major mobile platforms in the market. The steady growth of wireless information and communication technology in convergence with rise in the penetration of Internet has led to the evolution of a wide range of mobile applications like news, multi-player games, social networking, messaging, etc. that need to access remote data. For the optimal functioning of all these applications an efficient synchronization mechanism is vital. However smart-phones have limited computational resources, power restrictions and intermittent Internet connections which pose a challenge for smooth synchronization. This paper proposes a two-way data synchronization mechanism between multiple Android clients and a central server to address these challenges. We employ a batching logic to ensure efficient data transfer in poor network environments and a server-side conflict resolution mechanism to reduce overhead on the clients, which ensures optimal processing and battery power consumption by the clients.